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Do the math: How an Ottawa hockey dad crunched the numbers to prove girls weren't getting their fair share of ice time

Author of the article:

Joanne Laucius • Ottawa Citizen

Publishing date:

February 23, 2016 • 3 minute read

Nalin Bhargava, president of the Ottawa Girl's Hockey Association, gives a pep-talk to the team he co-coaches at Brian Kilrea Arena. Bhargava is unhappy with the inequality between the amount of ice time given to boys versus girls hockey.Darren Brown/ Ottawa Citizen

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Bhargava, dentist, hockey dad and president of the Ottawa Girls Hockey Association, wondered why there wasn’t a single boys’ team on the list. When he asked around, he found that girls’ teams were buying time on private ice more often than boys’ teams.

Ice time is a coveted commodity in hockey circles. Teams have to pay about $160 for an hour on a city rink and about twice that in a private arena. Hockey leagues use as much city time as possible before turning to more expensive private sources.

For Bhargava, the information that girls teams were paying more often for private ice flew against assurances from the city that time was distributed equitably according to a formula. If the formula worked, why were girls’ teams buying so much ice time? he asked himself.

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So the Ottawa Girls Hockey Association struck a committee to do the math. It did a comprehensive analysis, which took about a year.

“We started with the exact formula that the city uses to allocate ice. We then counted all the minor hockey players in the region and all the teams,” says Bhargava. “We used the city’s formula to calculate who should get what.”

According to their calculations, the boys’ teams got 80 per cent of the ice time they requested, compared with 57 per cent for the girls. The committee wrote a 24-page PowerPoint presentation, presented it to the city, and threatened to make a human rights complaint. Bhargava enlisted lawyer Lawrence Greenspon back him up at City Hall.

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It costs more to register on a girls’ team than a boys’ team because the girls have to pay more to buy private ice time, says Bhargava.

“The fact of the matter is that there’s a girl tax in the city of Ottawa.”

This week, the city is revisiting how ice is allocated, and Bhargava considers it a victory. The formula hasn’t changed, just the way it’s applied, he says.

Staff proposals, which will be before the Community and Protective Services Committee on Thursday, include taking away hours from some hockey organizations and distributing them according to validated numbers of participants. Some associations with “historical” ice time will get less, while growing organizations will get more.

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If approved by council next month, parks and recreation staff will allocate time according to a new baseline starting in September. Annual adjustments of up to five per cent will be made in the second, third and fourth years to reflect changing participation in each organization.

Other municipalities have also faced complaints that girls weren’t getting their fair share of ice time. In 2009, men’s shinny groups and the Greater Toronto Hockey League were moved out of Toronto arenas and into different time slots after the Toronto Leaside Girls Hockey Association threatened a human rights complaint.

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But it cuts both ways. In 2012, a minor-league hockey coach in Stephenville, N.L., launched a complaint claiming that girls had an unfair advantage in acquiring hockey skills because they could get extra time by belonging to both mixed and all-female teams.

Bhargava expects the dispute over ice time in Ottawa will get bitter. “There’s a lot of money at stake here,” he says.

The girls’ teams in his organization are paying about $100,000 for private ice time this year. Bhargava figures that if they got 70 per cent of the city ice time they requested, the association would save about $50,000. In order for that to happen, the boys’ teams would lose 300 hours, he says.

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